The Devil You Know
Amelia brings you along on a fact finding trip to Battenbury Cast * Amelia Spens Plot Scenic Battenbury Amelia meets you in a field on your way to New Canton, but she’s lured you here under false pretenses. Instead of a post delivery, she wants you to come with her to Battenbury. Clockwise Around The Town Veronica surrounded Battenbury with concrete walls to keep the V-Types in. Amelia’s had some steps built so you can look into the town, and notes that the V-Type virus has overridden all other zombie virus variants. Burrowing Away While you run, Amelia tells you how she survived the initial zombie outbreak. She pauses to test the V-types using your scarf: they’re not distracted by movement, and instead continue scrabbling at the walls to get out. Should Probably Keep Moving Amelia continues the story of her survival, which involved setting the Glass Protocol on someone about to turn and then escaping with ANNIE’s help. The V-Types seem to have spotted you now, so you keep moving. Faster Than Last Time The real reason for your visit to Battenbury is so Amelia can show V-Type behaviours. As soon as one gets your scent they all converge and swarm, working almost as one organism to reach you. Pulled Itself Up Onto The Walkway Your path runs out, and you have to split up onto separate wooden walkways. The McShell Manoeuver doesn’t work, and the zombies have climbed onto your half of the walkway. You have to run! Start Thinking About Survival Just in time you kick away the walkway, and escape the zombie. As expected, Amelia knew using your scarf would make the zoms chase you and not her. But she brought you here because you need to fully understand what you’re up against, and suggests you tell Veronica about the McShell Manoeuver no longer being effective. S07E09 // Rofflenet Discussion regarding this mission can be found on Rofflenet Transcript AMELIA SPENS: Runner Five, over here. By the fence, not the bushes. What are you doing there? Honestly, we haven’t got all day. You’re looking well. I did tell Janine to make sure all the runners have been getting adequate rest. Having said that, whenever I give her advice, she looks at me like I’ve just offered her a fresh handful of steaming vomit, so I probably can’t take any credit. Ah, I see you’re carrying the Fort Canton post bag. Yes, I must admit that was a little ruse on my part to get you over here. There won’t be a runner from Canton meeting you here. At least, not for a while. I thought you could say when you get back that they’d kept you waiting, you’d been chased by zombies, something of that sort. Look, you don’t have to come with me today. Obviously, I asked for you to be sent over here so we could talk. I’ve been thinking of this for a while, but after that fiasco with Evans and Jones, it seemed more urgent. I think they really did have an ANNIE core, by the way. It’s just the sort of thing your friend Veronica’s been looking for, and it would have been useful to both of us if we’d been able to work out how to get Jones on side. Especially now. Look, I hope you’ve known me long enough to understand that I never do anything without a reason. Especially not when it involves running, it’s not my idea of a leisure activity. But I have something to show you. You can just press that button on your headset at any time to call Sam, and that would be all right. I like Sam, actually. But I’d rather just talk to you alone for a little while, Five. All right, good. Uh, follow me down this track. We’ll need to be quick so you’re not missed at Abel. We’re going for a tour around scenic Battenbury, just the two of us. AMELIA SPENS: There it is. Veronica threw up some concrete walls around Battenbury when she spotted the V-types multiplying in there. laughs I say walls. I think it looks rather like someone heaped some spoonfuls of porridge out in lumps all over the place. I’ve had some people carve steps into the outer layer of porridge so we can run around it and observe the scene without putting ourselves at risk. Porridge is a rather appropriate metaphor, actually. Did you ever read that story when you were a child, Five? “The Magic Porridge Pot”? Someone wishes for porridge, and the magic pot keeps on giving and giving until the whole town is full of porridge. laughs I think of that sometimes. Sigrid and Van Ark and the dippy, hippie Moonchild all wished for something. Eternal life, or happiness, or power. And the magic zombie pot just kept on giving it to them until it killed them. Obviously, I enjoy the finer things in life, but I do think you need to know when to say enough, when to cash your chips in and leave the table. Always have an escape route, Five. That’s my advice to you. Come on, after you. Up onto the ramparts. footsteps Look down there. Do you remember Battenbury before? It was quite the cornucopia. Zombies with the plague, zombies with the pox, zombies with feet instead of faces, zombies with faces instead of feet. Zombies melted into walls, zombies melted into each other. Now what do you see? roar They’re all V-types. Every one of them. That variant of the virus has written over everything else. I don’t think it wise to stay in one place for too long. They’ll notice us eventually. And you’ll note that some of them don’t have heads. I don’t know how they spot people, but it’s not with their eyes. We’ll go clockwise around the town together. Come on, Five. Run. AMELIA SPENS: I don’t think I’ve ever asked you how you escaped from the zombies the first time, Five. Some people don’t like to talk about that. Embarrassed that they survived when others died. We have nothing to be embarrassed about. We did the right thing! What were any of us supposed to do? Stay and die with everyone else? And then we’d all be dead, and the whole world would just be rotting corpses wandering around? I’m not embarrassed, anyway. I did what I had to. I was visiting the Xia-Hifa office on the day it started. Not officially. Brent and I had broken up by then. But I still had access to the buildings, and there were various business interests that brought me there. I had them showing me some new upgrades to various pieces of technology, and one of the lab technicians - what was her name, Tara? Rosie? Mia? I - I don’t know. Some name like that. Two syllables, rather pretty. Cindy? Taylor? No idea. Anyway, she started to cough. Now I had heard something about a plague already. Not enough, but something. I like to keep tabs on any development which might have a business opportunity buried in it. There had been reports that the European Rescue Force had incinerated a hospital full of plague victims the day before. Seemed unlikely, but I pay for unlikely information. There was something about Taylor’s cough. Well, we all know that now. You know, the way their eyes bulge as they cough? We were all in a sealed clean room looking at… what was it? They were very proud of a new chip or something. A tablet or something. I never cared until they could tell me what it did. And Taylor started coughing. And the cough turned into a growl. roars Look at that, Five. Those V-types down there. You see them working on the wall? Scrabbling at it? It’s meters thick concrete, but they’ve made a dent. Look at that one! Its finger bones are worn down to the middle joint but it’s still scratching away. That’s what we’re dealing with. And they won’t be deflected. Give me your scarf. Just give it to me. It’s just a scarf. I’ll get you a new one. There are teams of people knitting away in Fort Canton. rustles Thank you. Now, I’m going to throw it down there. rustles Look! Any normal zombies would have looked up when that scarf fell down. Movement, color, zombies turn their eyes, but these V-types weren’t distracted. They’re sniffing the air now, see them? They’ll find it eventually, stuck in the mud, but for now, they’re just burrowing away, trying to get at us. Come on, Five. Let’s move before they notice us. AMELIA SPENS: Do you remember the Glass Protocol, Five? That DNA tracking thing that’s been following you? I suspect whatever Veronica did to ANNIE has slowed it down, but I’m sure it’ll be back. It’s a horror. I knew they were doing DNA tracking at Xia-Hifa, but I didn’t know exactly how they weaponized it. sigh Honestly, if I did know how it worked, I’d call it off for you. I mean that. Well, what I mean is that I’d tell you exactly what price I’d charge you for calling it off, and I would absolutely do what I said I’d do when you did your part. A life like mine doesn’t work if people don’t believe you’re going to do what you say you will. I think you understand that. Anyway, there we were in a clean room with a woman turning zombie, and I’d heard a presentation on this DNA tracking device. And one of the reasons I was in the building was to pocket one of the call buttons for the Glass Protocol. Nice little things about the size of a credit card. Break the glass seal at the top, point the device at whoever you want, then tell the Glass Protocol to pursue them. I’d slipped one into my pocket when we were going through the labs. I was willing to bet ANNIE wouldn’t stop me on the way out of the building. Anyway, I obviously broke the glass and pointed it at Taylor. throat ANNIE was very efficient back then, before her priorities got scrambled. She always kept me absolutely safe, got me out of the Xia-Hifa building. But the Glass Protocol didn’t care about anything else. When it arrived in that room, it was… well, you’ve seen it. Everything went dark. There was something there with us, black and darker black and fog. I could have grabbed some of the others and taken them with me, I suppose, but ANNIE was whispering in my ear telling me where the exit was. And I ran and closed the door behind me. I locked them in with the zombie. And with the dark thing that keeps coming after you as long as it has your DNA. I’m sure some of your Abel Township do-gooders would say that it was very shocking, but I don’t think I have a single thing to regret. I did what I had to do! roar Oh, look, those V-types have seen us. Or smelled us, or I don’t know, tracked us via our DNA, whatever it is they do. Look, we should probably keep moving before they work out how to climb the walls. AMELIA SPENS: Listen, Five, as you can guess, I haven’t brought you here for the good of my health. I wanted to show you what these things are really like en masse. This is the safest place to view them, which is not to say it’s exactly safe. Yes, I’ve seen this before. Once one of them has seen you, they all start to converge. Look at them. Do you see how they’re swarming over that wrecked building in the center of town? Big windows, it used to be a swimming pool. There it goes. One of the struts has collapsed against those houses, do you see? And now they’re all blindly groping their way towards the strut that will bring them higher, closer to us. How do they know? Oh, look at that one in the front. No head. Waving its arms wildly until - yes, there, it’s grabbed onto the underside of that roof. The longer we stay here, the closer they’ll get to us. I don’t know how they know we’re here, or how they work together. shudders It’s almost like they’re one organism, like a climbing plant creeping its way along a wire, sucker by sucker. Look, that lead one fell, but the next one’s trying a new route to get to us, do you see? I think they’re faster at it now than they were the last time I was here. shudders We have to keep moving. Come on, Five! Clockwise. Run! AMELIA SPENS: Ah, yes. My people did warn me about this. Part of the route around Battenbury is blocked just ahead of us. They’ve put a timber walkway up for us over the town. Do you see how it branches in two forks? We are not as far ahead of the V-types as I would have liked at this point, Five. I think they’re learning. Every time I come here, they spot me a little faster. You’ll notice them clambering up that building beneath the wooden walkways. One more zombie body, and they’ll be able to grab the walkways and pull themselves up onto them. But on the bright side, two walkways, two of us. Perfect time to attempt a McShell maneuver. You take the high road, I’ll take the low road, and the zombies should go directly down the middle, avoiding both of us. Come on, we have to be quick or they’ll catch us. footsteps static Oh, that doesn’t seem to be working. Five, don’t look down! All of the zombies are following you! One of them has pulled itself up onto the walkway behind you, Five. It has no head, but it’s stumbling toward you, and the others are trying to grab at you. Run! squeals, walkway collapses AMELIA SPENS: Oh, well done, Runner Five. You managed to kick that wooden walkway out from under that zom just before it grabbed you. Very swift work! Right. Yes, you don’t need to look at me like that. Yes, I did suspect that dropping your scarf down there earlier would somehow key them into chasing you, not me. DNA, maybe, or something else. But you did very well, and we’re both still alive, so everything’s fine! Listen, I respect you, Five. I didn’t bring you here to put your life in danger. Well, not more danger than you voluntarily put it in every day, anyway. I wanted to tell you a few things. Number one, you need to know what these things are. They’re not just another kind of zombie. They’re working on a totally different principle to the zombies we’ve encountered before. Even the ones with no eyes or nose can follow. Noisemakers don’t work, McShell maneuver doesn’t work. They self-organize. Janine may talk about bringing the country together, but you know who’s working together? The V-types! Which brings me to number two. I think you need to understand what the Last Riders represent. They are driving the country apart, and the country was doing a good enough job of breaking itself apart anyway. All the talk of peace conferences and fair trials and mercy missions giving the cure to outlying communities, none of that is working! Or not fast enough to unite the country. It’ll be everyone for themselves soon enough. Evans and Jones demonstrated that. Ordinary people have been fed so much misinformation that they can’t tell fact from fiction anymore. That’s not a country you can unite! At least, I don’t think so. What’s the point of developing any protocols for working with the V-types if no one will listen when you tell them? Look, we all have to do things we don’t particularly like at times like this, don’t we, Five? I’ll never ask how you survived the first time. And that’s number three, just between us. You have to think about how you personally are going to survive, Five. There will always be a place for you in Fort Canton. Just think about it. Look, here we are. Steps back to terra firma. The Abel Township post bag will be waiting for you to collect at the bottom of the hill. And you know, you can tell who you like about this, or not. Well, you might think of telling Veronica that the McShell doesn’t work anymore. She might find a way to save us. ANNIE was the only person I could rely on, once upon a time. Either way, my offer to you stands. It’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to live through this one. Codex Artefact 'A new scarf from Amelia ' Surprisingly enough, Amelia's kept her word about replacing the scarf she sacrificed on your last mission together. While it might not be as soft or as lovingly knitted as your old scarf, it does go ratheR fetchingly with your headset. Category:Mission Category:Season Seven